Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos: A Social History of the Tattoo With Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks 1950-1965

Explore the dark subculture of 1950s tattoos!In the early 1950s, when tattoos were the indelible mark of a lowlife, an erudite professor of English--a friend of Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, and Thornton Wilder--abandoned his job to become a tattoo artist (and incidentally a researcher for Alfred Kinsey). Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos tells the story of his years working in a squalid arcade on Chicago’s tough State Street. During that time he left his mark on a hundred thousand peop...